Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.

::: Claude Monet :::

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

::: Rumi :::

I haven’t shot landscape for a few months now. But the bug has been coming back. Sunday saw that itch return in full force, saw it evolve into a form of rampant photographic Ebola which wouldn’t let me go. But I tried.

It started when I went out to get something from my truck. There. In the space between the ti touka (cabbage tree) and the house next door, a cloud was forming. It bubbled and boiled and trembled and reared up, pressing its shoulders against the dark blue ceiling of the sky, a big cumulo-nimbus, full of sound and fury. I turned my back on it and tried to ignore it. I was feeling grumpy. The storm should have been here yesterday. It was late. (more…)

“You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas; you’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.”

Kia ora tatou:
James, the guy who does my IT, reckons I have an inordinate ability to torture my PC to its limits. He may be right. 750Mb PhotoShop files can do that to a machine!

But I have learned a few things which I want to share.
Firstly Lightroom. He has been telling me I needed to clean up that particular act. I set out to do it yesterday as a result of diminishing space on my C: drive. I decided to move my catalogue and the backups to an external E-Sata drive ( kind of like a USB external, only much quicker). I have 2 sitting out the back (along with the 6 drives ( around 5Tb) in my case). I decided to use Total Commander, since I suspected there was a lot of data to go. Windows is fine for small quantities, but for large folders and numbers of files, it can make mistakes and lose data. You need to use an industrial strength utility like Total Commander ( shareware) to move large folders and files. What is TC? “Total Commander is a file manager for Windows, a program like Windows Explorer to copy, move or delete files. However, Total Commander can do much more than Explorer, e.g. pack and unpack files, access ftp servers, compare files by content, etc!” In other words, it moves data and checks the destination files against the originals. Of course it does way more than this.
Back to the story. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

You would think they could get it right in the factory…. Some 6 months ago, I upgraded my frontline DSLR to a Canon 1Ds Mk III. At  $NZ11500, you would expect it to be a OOB (out of the box) experience. Well it pretty much was…for a few weeks, until the Quick Control Dial started playing up and intermittenting. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t… After some discussion (read: carefully controlled anger) with Canon NZ, they replaced it. And my sharp pictures went away… I decided it was substandard shooting technique on my part , and it was time for an upgrade of how I worked in the field. I aim to have a file which will print beautifully at 20″ X 30″. Any more is really pushing the limits of what the camera can achieve.

1. I began using mirror lockup and a cable release. It helped a little, but the images were still unsharp.
2. I took to using my Manfrotto 058 tripod, which weighs 6.15 kg. Some improvement, but i was still having to reach into the esoteric corner of my CS3sharpening toolbox.
3. I changed the head to a Manfrotto  229. It added 2kg, but the improvement was minor.
4. Both the Mk III’s suffer from intermittent focus issues (read: lack of consistency), so I began practising the multi-tap technique.  As Rob Galbraith writes in his extensive article on the 1D MK III, : To give yourself a reasonable chance with One Shot, it looks like you’ll want to pump the autofocus two or three times with it pointed at the same area of the subject. Alternatively, switch the camera to AI Servo, configure it to autofocus only when the rear AF-ON button is pressed, then “lock” the focus by releasing AF-ON. Not only did AI Servo produce more consistent stationary subject autofocus than One Shot (albeit in limited testing), it also means you don’t have to switch AF settings when the subject starts to move. Just press AF-ON. Again only marginal (if any) improvement.

Then it gradually dawned that perhaps the issue was not my technique, that the camera was front/back-focusing. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Well, nothing whatsoever to do with sealing wax…

There are still plenty of spaces left on the Summer Sundays, so if you were thinking of coming, sign up!

1. Nick Heaphy and I will be working hard to teach you everything you need to know to know about the vexing question of colour management
2. Mary Jo and I will be running a workshop on Creativity and how to move your thinking about picture-making forward, not to mention a few cool techniques to get you in touch with your creativity
3. Then there are the plugin and photobook workshops. While they will be how-to, hands-on workshops, I really can’t help myself and I will be weaving some art theory/creative process threads in amongst them…
4. Doc and I are excited about working together, which we will be doing on the the 2 Artists, one Day workshop. We see things a lot the same way, then we don’t. And he is a filmie….well, so am I now (sort of) again…
5. And for those of you who want to take your CS3/4 techniques to a new level, there are still 2 places left on the Digital Intensive in Akaroa. 4 days of pushing the boundaries, including the (creative) use of layers, layer masks, blending modes, multiple development, smart objects, plugins, and 101 ways to ( selectively) sharpen, to name but a few….

See you there.